Bones Worth Building On, Part I

Contrary to popular belief, most trucks nowadays merely serve as catch-all light-duty vehicles. For the most part, modern trucks do everything from hauling dirt to hauling kids. With air conditioning, cloth seats, and cruise control, modern trucks are more like big cars with a big open box in the back. As a result, modern truck owners seldom ask much from their rigs.

Old trucks wished they got off so easy. Before Chevy introduced the Cameo and before Ford introduced the Ranchero, trucks were plain and simply manual laborers. As a result, people often rode 'em hard and put 'em away wet. Payloads shifted in beds and gravel roads peppered fenders and mud-caked crevices, and most truck owners couldn't care less. After such a hard life, many truck owners retired their trucks behind barns well after their useful lives ended.

And here we fools go dragging 'em out and cleaning 'em up for a second go 'round. With reproduction body panels, rubber, and trim, the truck worlds our oyster. But there's something beneath that shiny paint, something beneath that fresh chrome, and something behind that new rubber that still bespeaks of a life lived hard--a battered chassis. In a way, building a trick pickup on a beat chassis is tantamount to building a mansion on a clapboard foundation.

So Bill O'Rourke over at the The Roadster Shop in Elgin, Illinois, tooled up a few alternatives. He's manufactured chassis for '28-37 and '55-57 Chevy passenger cars, and '28-59 Ford and Chevy pickups for over two decades. He covers Plymouth and Dodge from '32-34, and he even made a '32 Chrysler frame--although he admits the demand's pretty low on that one. He even offers a smattering of frames for the '37-42 Willys-Overland cars. In fact, O'Rourke said that, if provided with a stock frame for reference, The Roadster Shop can make a chassis for just about any pickup with provisions for just about any suspension style. In this case, we'll show what goes into a '55-59 Chevy short-box pickup chassis to prove it.

These aren't just pretty faces, either. As with all their frames, they hand-cut each frame plate--top, bottom, interior, and exterior sides--from 10-gauge pickled-and-oiled hot-rolled steel. Now don't confuse this steel with rough, garden-variety, hot-rolled steel; this is some pretty clean stuff that "looks more like stainless than anything else," O'Rourke said.

Once trimmed and fitted, they fixture-weld each panel to its mate. Before welding the interior boxing plate to the C-channel-shaped frame, however, they back-weld the joints to create a battleship-tough framerail. And according to O'Rourke, the hot-roll steel itself is stronger than the steel many manufacturers use for stamped frames--so "we can get a stiffer frame from this steel," he said.

Chalk up yet another advantage to fabricated rails: versatility. Instead of working within the confines of a permanent-die stamping technique, the fabrication method gives The Roadster Shop the ability to accommodate just about any frame modification or dimension. Want a longer wheelbase? No problem. Want it kicked up over the rear axle? Easy as pie. They even install nut inserts in all body-mounting and bracket holes to make body mounting that much easier.

And it doesn't end there, either. With the fabricated rails in their frame fixture, they fit an eight-point tubular crossmember with a dropout transmission crossmember to span the structure. Depending on the application, they also offer several suspension styles. Out back, The Roadster Shop's frames accommodate parallel-leaf, triangulated four-bar, parallel four-bar, and a pro street-style narrowed four-bar suspension designs. Pony up to the top and they'll even install one of Heidt's SUPERIDE IRS systems.

Up front they offer the popular buggy-sprung arrangements for early-Ford applications, and for just about everything else (including early Ford), they've got Heidt's Mustang II or SUPERIDE crossmembers. To suit your specific preferences, they'll install any of the popular aftermarket manufacturers' suspension systems, too. Whatever the case, they carry a multitude of control arm options--including stamped, tubular steel, or stainless-steel control arms.

The options don't end there, either; they maintain rear disc brakes, power boosters, and even anti-roll bars on their options list. In other words, they've got everything from basic frames to full rollers.

There's much to show in this chassis' fabrication, so we're breaking it up into two monthly installments. This month we'll concentrate on The Roadster Shop's construction techniques. Next month we'll install components and finish off the frame details. Until then, study up on them fresh new bones!